Idol Chatter

I am writing this without having seen the entire performance show. I did watch the results show last night however and I am glad Ace is finally gone.
I was surprised to see Chris in the bottom 3 and I have the feeling that he is going to stop listening to Simon and start rocking out again next week. Well, maybe not next week. I don't know too many hard rock love songs.
Andrea Bocelli is inspired casting as next week's special guest. Too bad they aren't going to make the final 6 sing his songs though. I'd pay $1000 to watch Kellie Pickler sing "Con te Partiro."
I was very disappointed to see that Taylor Hicks did not take hit Ritalin and butchered one of my favorite songs, "You Send Me." I fast forwarded so that I could see his rendition. He started off great, smooth and classy, just like Sam Cooke. Then he went into his epilectic seizure phase and threw in a whole bunch of nonsense "you thrill me, you kill, you chill me, you fill me." I was even more upset when Simon said his seizure was "magic."
Speaking of magic, Katharine McPhee looked magical didn't she?
Also, Wednesday morning I did a very well produced piece on the business of Idol.
The franchise so far has made about a billion dollars in ad sales, album sales, ticket sales, promotional tie-ins. A 30-second ad costs about $600,000, double that for the finale.
Albums of the winners have sold nearly 25 million copies.
Idol has been generous this season in that some of the guests were promoting albums for labels other than the one to which the Idol winners are signed.
Also, the show completely took "Bad Day" from a song by a nobody, Daniel Powter, to a smash hit. The song had been out for a while, but only after Idol took it as their "swan song" did it hit #1 on the billboard chart, while simultaneously being the most downloaded song. I must admit though, it is pretty catchy.